Dr. Elaine Schattner is a writer and physician with a unique perspective on medicine. Her views on healthcare are informed by her experiences since childhood with scoliosis, and as an adult with breast cancer and other health conditions.

After graduating from Yale College, Elaine received her medical degree at the NYU School of Medicine. After completing a residency in internal medicine, and fellowship in cancer and blood diseases, she performed research in cancer immunology and cared for patients with all kinds of malignancies. She has been on the faculty of Weill Cornell Medical College since 1993.

Elaine is writing her first book, on changing public attitudes toward cancer. Her freelance work has appeared in the Pacific Standard, Scientific American, Slate, The New York Times, the New York Observer, the Atlantic, Cure magazine and elsewhere.

She occasionally posts about cancer, medical news, ethics and health care on her personal blog, Medical Lessons. You can follow Elaine on Twitter.

In a hospital in Brooklyn, you might hear the voice of Bessie Smith. That's because the New Brooklyn Theater has set a rare production of Edward Albee's 1959 play, The Death of Bessie Smith, inside Interfaith Medical Center. But you won't see an actress cast in...

It's a holiday week. But when the New York Times published another op-ed by Dr. H. Gilbert Welch of the Dartmouth Institute on yet another, misleading two-author analysis of breast cancer screening by him and one other scientist, I thought it worth noting some concerns.

This October, there's some encouraging news on the breast cancer front. Yes, there are new drugs in the pipeline and ongoing trials -- the same old, real progress, slow as usual. Until last week, that is, when there came a hint of meaningful change in the breast cancer...

An intriguing new study found that the vast majority of deaths from breast cancer occur among women who didn't have routine mammography. The report, published in the journal Cancer, applied "failure analysis" -- a way, typically used in engineering to see what might have gone wrong...

At the annual meeting of the American Society in Clinical Oncology, oncologists highlighted the unpublished, updated results of a large, long-term trial from the U.K. involving thousands of women with early-stage breast cancer. The aTTom study findings adds to the emerging consensus that pre-menopausal women with estrogen receptor...

Today the U.S. Supreme Court will review a case about a company's ownership of human gene sequences. The issue, involving Myriad Genetics and patents related two cancer-linked molecules, BRCA1 and BRCA2, seems straightforward, so much so I considered not writing on it. After all, how could...

This week the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the incidence of young women presenting to doctors with Stage IV breast cancer has been climbing. For those affected by the disease between the ages of 25 and 39, the number who first learn they have cancer...

Last week, the Annals of Oncology published a new report on bias in reports on breast cancer trials. The investigators analyzed how clearly, or not, academic journals represent clinical findings. They looked at spin -- what you might call "hype" -- about positive results, and how clearly the...

October's fading. This year, it seems like Breast Cancer Awareness Month has taken on a subdued, faded tone. The pink ads and ribbons, so ubiquitous in recent memory, appear smaller and farther between. Last weekend, as marchers in the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer passed through my neighborhood,...

Last week delivered some disconcerting news for people with a specific, strong inherited high risk for developing cancer. An analysis published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) found that young women with BRCA mutations are more likely to develop breast cancer if they've had more diagnostic...

My heart leaped upon hearing the SCOTUS decision on Obamacare. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the central components of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This decision, a huge victory for patients, offers a message of hope -- one that's relevant not just to politics...

This weekend, researchers at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology presented new findings on a novel agent that targets some forms of breast cancer. The new drug, called T-DM1, is designed to deliver a toxic chemotherapy directly to tumor cells....

Doctors have understood for decades that breast cancer is not one disease. Still, and with few exceptions, knowledge of breast cancer genetics -- information on cancer-causing mutations in the malignant cells -- has lagged. Here's the paradox: Because effective treatments exist for most patients with this disease, the...

Like most women, physicians and mothers of my generation in the U.S., I've been fortunate to learn of deaths from wire hangers and shady abortionists only indirectly. Last week I realized that I've taken women's health, or what's really at issue -- women's access to needed care --...

Susan Niebur is a 38-year-old mom and astrophysicist who lives near Washington, D.C. In most mornings, lately, she chats with her husband as he drives to a medical center for her near-daily radiation treatments. She has metastatic breast cancer (MBC) that's spread to her spine and other bones.

In late June, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) held an unusual, open-door and emotionally-packed meeting of its Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee (ODAC). The topic was Avastin, a costly cancer treatment. The panel listened to testimony from women, including my cousin, about their ongoing cancer treatments. It heard,...

Like many New Yorkers, might-be feminists, hematologists and others, I was saddened to learn of Geraldine Ferraro's death. The Depression-era born mother, public school teacher, attorney, criminal prosecutor, Congresswoman, 1984 Democratic VP-candidate and otherwise accomplished woman from this region, succumbed to complications of multiple myeloma at...

A new report in the Journal of the American Medical Association may influence -- and reduce -- surgical treatment for many women diagnosed with breast cancer. The key finding is that for women with apparently limited disease before lumpectomy and what's called a positive sentinel node,...